It was Martin Luther King who memorably said, in a speech at the University of West Michigan (WMU) in 1963, that “the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless”. This aphorism has proved largely true for the U.S. since the enactment of significant improvements in federal Civil Rights law in that decade.

However, history on the wider stage has rudely resisted Dr King’s dictum. Restraint, where it has occurred, has more often resulted from Realpolitik, a sober juxtaposition of threats or assessment of interests, than from legislation. And where legislation has been brought to bear, it has been notably toothless: the Rwandan genocide took place under the astonished eyes of several nations’ UN peacekeepers, UN resolutions are routinely ignored and the massacre at Srebrenica took place full in the face of the newly created International Criminal Court, a body which in the last ten years has only managed to convict one person, notably declined to recognize events in southern Sudan as constituting genocide and is currently sitting on the fence waiting for Syria to degenerate into the kind of internecine bloodbath that no amount of jurisprudence can ever adjudicate nor will ever reconcile.

But let’s take a closer look at what Dr King actually said, before concluding that the world has thumbed its nose at him: “the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless” ... “can”, he said, not “will”. In other words, the law, as a restraint, is only as good as the credibility of its framers and the scope of its jurisdiction. International law is woefully lacking in both these aspects. Where it has scope it lacks credibility, being often unenforceable – maritime laws on fishing quotas and species protection are notable examples – and where it has credibility it lacks scope, being simply inapplicable – as is the case with any attempt to legally restrain the State of Israel. Such actions invariably come up hard against the special status accorded that nation by guilt-ridden allied powers after World War II.

So what is needed for international law to be as effective as the legislation of a sovereign state within its own borders? The answer is as obvious as it is implicit in the question: a sovereign and duly constituted international state whose borders are those of the planet. For there can be no valid law without order and an international order is necessary for international law to be effective.

However, order does not grow from law, but rather the reverse. It is not the sheriff acting alone who “tames” the town, but the citizens, acting within the existing order, who hire a lawman to enforce the laws they have enacted and make them work. Popular desire for a universally acceptable and choate order must first exist, prior to the drawing up of any code of law. Thus it was the will to shape the future, in the form of a new constitutional republic, which forged the base-plate for all American federal law that followed. A constitution, to whose underlying principles a judicial system can refer and upon whose sound institutional premises that system is constructed, must be the essential foundation of any nation, state or multi-state entity seeking recognition and legitimacy.

It was ever so and will continue to be true, however much the idea is daily flouted by an essentially unconstitutional Europe, tottering at the brink of an abyss of its own making, woefully lacking the legitimacy granted by the kind of fundamental law that has the support of all institutions and citizenry and would serve as the pivot and mainstay of a valid continental order. As Mrs Merkel and Mr Hollande have come to realize too late, only a United States of Europe, with all the in-built checks and balances of solidarity that this would incur, will be capable of economic sanity and the maintenance of a single currency, despite regional inequalities and differences in competitiveness.

The will to construct must arise from that which, as Dr King pointed out, cannot be changed by legislation:  the human heart. The kind of transformation of the heart that would be required both to construct and legitimise a genuine international order is profound and unambiguous. It is nothing less than the full acceptance of our planetary interdependence and single humanity, the recognition of which demands nothing less than a fair chance for each and everyone.  Such a fair chance is unthinkable without enforceable international laws and regulations built upon a legitimate, democratic order that, in its turn, is founded on the firm rock of constitutional primacy.

So long as certain States (notably the U.S., Russia, China and Israel) are prepared to submit the contentions and acts of others, but never their own, to international arbitration, a “new world order” worthy of the name will remain a beautiful dream. Furthermore, we should never be surprised when those whose existence is precarious, whose lives are endangered, whose rights are scoffed at, whose fairest, noblest, brightest and best are condemned never to fulfil their potential see in that dream not a noble aspiration, but a cynical piece of western cant designed to blow smoke in their eyes and soften their anger with pious phrases.

Those whose streams are choked before they can reach their meagre fields and whose ruined land is ploughed under for a stranger’s settlement, those who are denied the right to build are bound eventually to seize the chance to destroy. We have all journeyed too far down the road of “might is right” to be taken seriously when we speak of international order or international law. These concepts have become synonymous with big business, the interests of major powers and the inexorable logic of technocratic expansionism. Our vaunted new world is already dead in the womb of the old one. The entire journey must be started afresh with an approach designed to conquer the toughened fortress of the human heart rather than the ballot box.

For only genuine transformation can augment the capacity of the human heart to love, care, empathise and create lasting, viable solutions. Once a people are transformed by love of the common good, love of their common kind, love of our common homeland ... once legitimate “planetary patriotism” is able to engender the kind of vision they can believe in and hope to realize, the kind of goal they can honourably strive for, then only the heartless will remain untouched. Fortunately, in a sovereign international order built upon universal principles of justice and equity, there would then be laws – both credible and applicable – to restrain them.


© Edwin Drood, September 2012